I had the 1st gen model and although it was good it had a couple of bad features for me. It would smoke enough to set off my smoke detector. No matter what I did to clean it there was no improvement. The second problem was the shape of the grill grate. Food, like hamburger, would get wedged in the tracks and was very difficult to remove. Even the dishwasher had trouble. The new XL model is much better. No smoke and the grill grate is a massive improvement for cleaning.